Breakfast with Pandora

Cryptic post title day: MPDGs and ENFPs

It may be late to the party, but the video below piqued my interest. It's about "Manic Pixie Dream Girls" (MPDGs), a female character in a movie who, according to critics, "exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures."

75 Years of Manic Pixie Dream Girls from Flavorwire on Vimeo.

Furthermore, according to one recent critic, this character "remains a two-dimensional projection of the desires of a guy who is progressive enough in gender matters to want a woman who is 'interesting,' but not one that has an internal life of her own beyond the superficial qualities that made her 'cool' and 'not like other girls' to begin with."   

The ur-MPDG is Kirsten Dunst in the movie "Elizabethtown," but according to the video, there are a whole bunch more, including Katherine Hepburn, Audrey Hepburn, Meg Ryan, and Zooey Deschanel.

Now, I liked this video because it has a number of really lovely actresses and clips in it. But I don't agree with critics who say that MPDGs "exist solely" in someone's fevered imagination, or that in movies they remain "two-dimensional" projections. Perhaps in some movies this is true, but MPDGs-- as far as they exist in movies the way critics say they do-- come from real life.

MPDGs are based, in my opinion, on a certain substratum of the ENFP woman.

I've writting about the Myers-Briggs personality type indicator and ENFPs in the past, and I apologize in advance for those ENFPs in my readership who don't fit the stereotype rough sketch I'm going to produce. With it, I simply want to suggest that MPDG's (or at least some of the characters pegged as such in the video above) are not necessarily just products of a fevered writer's imagination.

ENFP women are among my favorite on the planet. They are among the planet's favorites, too. That's because they seem to be effortlessly perfect. They are always cheerful, charming, witty, kind, helpful, winning. They are friendly to everyone, they make friends with everyone, they seem carefree.

This type of woman can seem like a godsend to introverted, brooding writers. ENFPs are genuinely accessible and unthreatening. They like people and see a person's gifts and praise them. A number of ENFP women enjoy bringing introverts out of their shells. It's like spreading sunshine.

That portrait is the two-dimensional part, and that's why I used the word "seem" in it. That's because, underneath all the positives, the ENFP has as many or more problems, neuroses, issues, fears, history, and weirdnesses as or than any other human being on the earth. Some have more, because when one is that friendly, good, and interested in others, predators, stalkers, and other malefactors pop up in one's life and cause havoc.

Such a woman also attracts rescuers. It's an irresistible combination: guys want to rescue women who are both genuinely good and friendly and who find their natural outgoing natures taken advantage of.

I think screenwriters have captured this type of three-dimensional woman on screen. Consider Audrey Hepburn in "Breakfast at Tiffany's." She appears in the MPDG video, but I don't consider her character, Holly Golightly, two-dimensional in any way. The brooding writer character played by George Peppard idolizes Hepburn at first for her ability to bring him out of his shell. Soon he begins to glimpse and then discern her issues and complexities. He then tries to rescue her multiple times, and never really suceeds. Two minutes before the end of the film, he's still trying and still not succeeding. The end of that movie gives us a feel-good moment, but nothing is really resolved.

"Breakfast at Tiffany's" is a brilliant example of a movie that resists simplification of a difficult ENFP woman character.

Myers-Briggs might also explain why American cinema gives us characters who can be classified, rightly or wrongly, as MPDGs. ENFPS often feel called to acting and drama. Male screenwriters, who are often introverted, brooding types, do often meet actresses. Hollywood must be filled with aspiring introverted screenwriters who meet aspiring ENFP actresses. The few screenwriters who make it to actually writing movies that get produced have the memories of knowing those actresses. The memories might actually be quite strong and emotionally intense. That type of experience is going to osmose into movies.

Is there such a thing as a pure MPDG? I haven't seen "Elizabethtown." My first novel, which I wrote as a young teen, features an ENFP teen. She is a genuinely friendly and charming princess who briefly causes the hero to stray from his natural love, the shy tomboy who has shared all his adventures with him. Is my princess an MPDG? Possibly. But then, I was only 16 when I wrote her.

Do you know of any MPDGs that you detest? Like? How often are quirky young women two-dimensional in movies? Comment, comment away.

When myth makes national news

I would not normally have anything useful to say about the unspeakable tragedy in Aurora, Colorado. That is the type of thing that warrants grief-filled silence.

But there is one aspect of the event that comes into the bailiwick of Breakfast with Pandora: the connection between the shooter and the intense, violent story being told where he chose to shoot.

Did "The Dark Knight Rises" bear any responsibility for the shooter's act? Does myth-- deeply-felt stories told over and over again by a particular culture-- adversely affect our behavior?

This particular shooter has gone on record as having been directly affected by the Batman story that "Rises" tells: he said he "was the Joker," a villain from the iconic comic book series. The Joker is violent, so he decided to take on that persona and commit violent acts.

So did the story drive the shooter to his crime?

Here is a suggestion from movie reviewer Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle:

Can we at least consider the possibility that our movies have become a feedback loop for national neurosis, celebrating it, glorifying it and nourishing it?

It has long been clear to me that our current cinema — in the United States — has lost the Female Principle, that our cinema, especially our most popular cinema, is concerned only with external things, to the exclusion of inner values, and the external thing that it’s mainly concerned with is violence.

I bent myself into contortions trying to say something nice about THE DARK KNIGHT RISES in my review today, knowing that this is not, generically, my kind of movie and thus I should make some kind of allowance for the bias of personal predilection.  But there is something in this kind of cinema that strikes me as essentially anti-human — a cinema where human interaction is a kind of unreal expression standing in for real emotion — and where the only things that actually feel real are chaos and calamity.

I understand Mr. LaSalle's point, and I agree with him in some particulars. But I wouldn't agree that our popular cinema feeds a "national" neurosis-- just, in this case, one particular deranged mind.

In fact, I think it is a real blessing that it in this country, where violence is glorified in stories, where there is so much dark, difficult material out there, not only in movies but in comic books, novels, TV shows (ever seen "Dangerous Minds"?), and where guns are so readily available for legal sale, it's truly a blessing that this type of tragedy does not happen more often.

In fact, maybe violence in stories REDUCES violence in real life.

Aristotle the Greek philosopher would contend that violence in stories should calm a person down. He wrote that the action of a tragic drama (such as "Oedipus the King," one of the most intense stories ever created) should bring about a psychological "cleansing" or "purgation" (catharsis) of emotions. Scholars differ as to what that actually means, but it's clear Aristotle considered it a good thing. In my course on Greek mythology I called it the "wet noodle" effect-- the calming, centering effect that an overwhelming rush of adrenaline has on a person.

Would this shooter have done what he did without the fantasy of becoming a character in a drama? I think he would have. I think he would have found some outlet or excuse or pretense.

Is "The Dark Knight Rising" dehumanizing? Does it, rather than purge one's emotions, incite one to violence? Possibly. I can't judge because I haven't seen it and probably won't. I don't need that type of adrenaline rush very often.

Most likely, we are dealing with one person who is mentally ill, or disordered personality-wise, and it is as simple as that. As long as we have people who can't cope with their world, we will have trouble. I don't think myth causes that, or that there's anything that myth can do about it.